Love and life lessons - fiction with a heart, the fiction of Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy.

Monday, June 3, 2013

Free First Chapter: In Love's Own Time - could you fall in love with a ghost?

If falling in love with a ghost is romantic and if time
traveling to make a real relationship possible piques your fancy, In Love’s Own
Time might be the perfect read and here's the first chapter so you can find out!

The blurb:

There
may be no place like home and nothing like love…..when history teacher Lillian
Dorsey inherits a three story Edwardian brick mansion from the grandfather who
banished her pregnant mother decades before, it’s a no brainer.She’ll visit the place, see it and sell
it.Instead Lillian’s captivated by the
beautiful home and intrigued by the ghost of the original owner, Howard
Speakman.Soon she’s flirting with the
charming, witty gentleman who’s been dead for more than a century and before
long, they admit it’s a mutual attraction. Still, when she’s alive and he’s dead, any
shot at being together seems impossible.

But
where there’s a will, there’s a way….one afternoon while pretending to visit
the past the impossible becomes a brief reality.If they visited 1904 before, Lillian knows
they can do it again and if so, she can prevent Howard’s untimely death.With a combination of love, powerful hope,
and stubborn will, Lillian bends time to her will and returns to the summer of
1904.But Howard’s death looms ahead and
if she’s to find a happy ending, she must save him from his original death.

Chapter
One

This was not what a haunted house
should look like, Lillian thought, gazing up at the old family home, setting of
her mother’s nightmares, and centerpiece for family stories. She expected
creepy but this was no more than vintage wine, a dust covered bottle with a
worn label.Although she had never seen
it until today, this was her house.The
grandfather she never met left her this legacy, the house he called home for
decades.She paused, observing each
detail to form her first impression.

Like a monarch, the old house
reigned over the neighborhood with faded dignity and remembered glory.No other homes were as large as Seven Oaks in
the surrounding streets and most were much newer than the once gracious Queen
Anne mansion.Although the original
beauty of the house was evident in the still sturdy brick, Seven Oaks’s glory
days were over.Corners of the front
porch sagged and the black teeth of rotten boards above were visible from the
street.The sun porch above the portico
where Landau carriages once allowed residents of the home to alight from a day’s
shopping around the Square downtown looked like it would be unsafe in a strong
wind.What remained of the spacious
lawn was unkempt with grass inches too tall and weeds that crowded the
fragrant, fragile perennials for space.

A
weathered, rusted chain blocked the original drive that wound up to the portico
and the cobbled surface was dotted with dandelions that survived between the
cracks. Her triumphant entry into this
ancestral manse had to be through the front door so Lillian Dorsey parked along
the narrow street and walked up the curving sidewalk that led to the porch.

From this angle,
the house looked immense, rising three stories.In the evening sun, the upstairs windows reflected
back like blind eyes staring out in an effort to determine who had come, who
mounted the front steps as if by right.The old tales that her mother had babbled about ghosts seemed much more
plausible in this setting but Lillian had no fear as she crossed the porch and
inserted the heavy old-fashioned key into the lock on the massive front door.

It opened
without a hitch; with no groans or creaks as she stepped into the entryway and
stopped to stare.Although she had
never set foot in this house, she knew it from faded sepia photographs.The oak stairs that rose upward and made a
sharp turn at the open landing felt familiar even in the dim light muted by
dust motes that floated in the air.With one hand on the heavy post at the foot of the stairs, Lillian
claimed her inheritance with an expected rush of emotions.Despite the fact that since leaving childhood
she had never called anywhere home for more than a year, she felt an odd sense
of homecoming. Six years teaching middle school had placed her in four
different school districts and each apartment had been a temporary landing
spot, nothing more.

The stairs
ascended to the right of the entry doors and to her left a long, wide room
stretched to the windows. A heavy coat rack stood beside the door and a low
sofa that even she could identify as antique reclined beneath a painting in an
ornate frame.Matching lamps that looked
like vintage Tiffany flanked the sofa on delicate tables frosted with fine
dust.Among the leather bound books
atop a small table, she spied a family Bible.For kicks, she flipped to the pages that recorded births and
deaths.Her mother’s name appeared
there, scrawled as the final entry.

An open living
room dubbed the parlor in it’s’ heyday caught the last of the sunshine. The light
enhanced the dark, aged wood of the built in bookcases and the ornate fireplace
crowned with mirrors.Books lined
built-in shelves, stacked in neat order like old soldiers at parade review.

Double
doors opened into the dining room, dominated by the massive table and chairs in
the center of the room.More built in
shelves held china and glassware behind beveled glass doors.The drawers would hold silver and linens she
mused.Dark woodwork trimmed the doorways
and windowsills in a style popular during King Edward’s brief reign.

On either side
of the small hallway exiting the dining room she found more rooms.The first was a study or second parlor.More shelves held books and a collection of
yellowed sheet music.An upright piano and
matching stool faced the entry door.In her fingers, the fragile paper crackled as
she lifted the top music to read the title, In
the Good Old Summertime.Must be from before Grandpa’s time, she
mused.The stories she had heard painted
him as a rather mean, austere man without a musical bone in his body.That meant that the piano and music must date
from before Grandfather David’s lifetime.

The kitchen
was large as her entire apartment.A
huge gas range that gave her the willies dominated one area. Using it would be difficult and terrifying. In another corner, a freestanding sink on four
metal legs crouched like a spider waiting for prey.More shelves and cabinets ringed the
room.Empty clay flowerpots in a deep windowsill
must have once grown herbs or perhaps bright geraniums. Perhaps in the summer months, the pots had
been outside on the rear brick porch, smaller, than but as sturdy as the one in
front.Beside the rear door was another
stair, this one as plain as the front staircase was grand.

She climbed
the stair and entered a wide corridor on the upper floor, stopping to flip on
an overhead light in the dim evening gloom. Seven doors opened from the hall; after
investigation, six were bedrooms furnished with exquisite antique furniture and
a bathroom with outdated fixtures lay between the two front bedrooms. There
was a small second bathroom near the top of the back stairs. One door opened
onto the sun porch above the portico but it was empty so she explored the front
bathroom instead.

A claw foot tub sat in the center
of the room, an odd place and yet it looked right.Indulgence in a late afternoon bath sounded
heavenly and the view from the three tall windows that faced north would be
beautiful. Lillian peered outside but it was dark and she could not see more
than the silhouettes of the tall oaks that ringed the house. Somewhere below
there had been gardens, her mother said, beautiful gardens with roses, lilacs,
lilies, and daisies now choked by weeds.

Above the
single light fixture dimmed and brightened before sputtering out.Left in darkness, she groped back into the
hall and edged down the front staircase, fingers tight on the banister.Engrossed in touring the house, she had not
noticed how silent it was until her footsteps echoed through the large rooms.

Just as she
reached the bottom and reached for the purse left on the bench at the foot of
the stairs, a shrill sound cut through the waves of silence.Lillian missed the last step and caught
herself as she grabbed her cell and flipped it open.

“It’s Lil.”

“Who else
would it be?” Her sister Lavinia’s voice sounded as crisp as if she stood at
her elbow.“Is the house very bad?”

She sat
down on the bottom stair.“No, it’s
nothing like I thought.”

13
Mockingbird Lane was what she had expected, notthis rundown, slightly shabby Edwardian lady.Nor did she think that the house would tug on
her heartstrings or birth a desire to stay.The plan had been to visit, assess the property, market any antiques,
and sell as soon as possible.

“What does
that mean?” Vinnie’s voice sounded choked as if she was laughing.

“It means I
like it.” Admission was the first step toward recovery.Staying here was not in the plan.“It was a beautiful house in its glory days
and still impressive, just rough around the edges.”

“Leave.Get out while you still can.Run!” Vinnie cackled over the phone.“It’s a lost cause already.I can tell.You’re hooked.Next, you will be
moving to Mayberry and becoming a regular at Home Depot.Maybe you can call up Ty Pennington and the
Home Makeover crew.”

“Funny.” Lillian
wasn’t amused.“The town’s called Neosho,
not Mayberry and I doubt there’s a Home Depot closer than the next biggest
city.I like the house, okay, but that
doesn’t mean I’m planning to move in or stay here.”

She could,
though.That was the problem.Envisioning a life here was not hard. A
little eclectic décor to jazz up the vintage antiques and the house could be a
showplace, somewhere her friends could gather for long holidays.In addition, if she ever found the right guy,
who could make marriage sound enticing and had a family, space would never be
an issue in this house.This was
temptation, hard to resist. That Vinnie sensed her weakness stung but then
Vinnie could always catch her in the littlest lie.On cue, her sister called her on this one.

“It’s a
lost cause already.Dollars to donuts,
you stay.God knows why.Mom didn’t want that old white elephant but
you do.”“Maybe.” She would concede that.“But, not for sure, not yet.Is she still mad because I came here?”“Mad does not begin to define
her anger.” Vinnie wasn’t laughing now.“She never got over her fight with Grandfather and she hates that
house.Maybe that’s why you like it so
much.”

Opposing
viewpoints had been lifelong points of contention.As a toddler, she preferred apple juice if
Mom offered orange or a bouncing ball instead of a baby doll.This was different; she came with the idea
she would have no feelings about the house, clean it out, and sell it with
money in her pockets.This comforting
sense of home blindsided Lillian and she did not like it, even as she longed to
stay and make this place home.

“Liking
this place doesn’t have anything to do with Mom; it’s about me,” Lillian said,
choosing each word with care to express her feelings.Although they shared the same mother, Lavinia
was Joe’s daughter and although the sisters were close, they were very
different. “I’m done for tonight, though.I’m off to the motel, a long, hot shower, and bed.Tomorrow I will come back and assess what I
want to do.Maybe it’ll look different
in the bright morning light.”

Darkness
gathered in the entry hall and tall shadows made deeper patches of black.Despite the gloom, Lillian could see well
enough to find her way to the front door.Just as she stepped outside and pulled it shut, she heard a small sound
within the house, something that sound like the faint plink of a piano
key.Couldn’t be, she mused, no ghosts lived
here as she continued down the walk.

She did not
look back until she was behind the wheel of her Buick and from the street, the
house seemed immense.Every window was
dark and she wished that she had left at least one lamp burning to dispel the
darkness.A movement in one of the
upstairs windows caught her eye and she focused on it.For a fraction of a single second, she
thought she saw a silhouette framed in the window but a bird careened out of
one of the oak trees and the image vanished.

I am tired,
she thought, and I am seeing things because of the stories.Hunger rumbled her stomach and she drove
back toward the highway where she had seen the Golden Arches and a few other
chain restaurants.Charmed by the Edwardian
house, she still craved light, modern plastics and people.

After a
Shoney’s meal, the basic motel room welcomed her.After a shower, she sprawled on the king sized
bed to watch a documentary on the History channel before falling asleep without
ever thinking about calling her mother.

Just when
she was deep into sleep country, her cell phone shrilled and she surfaced from
the depths of a dream to answer.

“Well, I
wondered when I didn’t hear from you.Are you still at Seven Oaks?”

Surprised
that Mom would utter the name of the house she purported to hate, Lillian
roused herself by sipping from a tepid Diet Pepsi on the nightstand.“No, I’m at a Best Western out by the
highway.I’ve been to the house,
though.”

“So, what
do you think?”

It was a
loaded question; one that she would not be able to answer and please her mother
but she could try.“Well, it’s a little
bit rundown and needs some housekeeping but it’s a lot nicer than I
expected.I was surprised that the
utilities are still on. From your stories, I expected a house of horrors but
it’s just a big, old house with a lot of antique charm.”

Sylvia
snorted. “I never said that Seven Oaks was as frightening as one of those
horror movies on television.There
aren’t any ghouls charging around with bloody knives or whatever they do in those
movies but there is something there.Didn’t you hear or see anything strange?”

“No, I
didn’t.What kind of strange should I
expect?”

“Footsteps,
knocking on the wall, strange smells, the piano playing, and a man walking
through the rooms.”

Classic
haunting, Lillian thought, nothing too terrifying.“If I hear or see anything, I’ll let you
know.Do you have any idea who the
ghost might be?”

“Oh,
Lillian, don’t mock me.I don’t know;
one of the original owners, I guess.”

“Seven Oaks
wasn’t always in the family?” Lillian grew up believing that maybe her
grandfather had been born there.She
had imagined generations of Davids living in the same location.

“Of course
not, my father bought it not long after he married my mother and that was in
1955. Seven Oaks was built around the turn of the century, 1900 something.”
Mom’s voice held a petulant whine, the tone in which she always told the horror
tales. “I think the people who built it were named Speakman. I guess the ghost
must have been one of them. Did I tell you about the time that I met the ghost
for the first time?”

Lillian
sank bank against the pillows and tuned out the stories. She knew them by
heart, anyway. One told of a man who appeared on the staircase one morning and
then vanished; another was the dark figure that stood over her mother’s bed
while Mom, then about eight years old, shivered with terror. None of the
stories ever seem that terrible to Lillian but they had been her mother’s bane
for decades. She picked up the conversation in time to finish it.

“And that’s
just a few of the things that happened so you watch out.”

“I will.”

“And call
me again tomorrow.”

She would
without the reminder. “I will, Mom. Good night.”

Ghosts did
not scare her; she did not believe in supernatural entities. She wondered more
about the man her grandfather was what he was like and if she had inherited any
of his traits. The lack of a grandfather bothered her; in grade school, she had
written him a letter but lost it before she could send it. In her early readers,
grandfathers were genial old gentlemen who bought ice cream cones or hair
ribbons. The man described by her mother was not like that at all. If Sylvia’s
stories were accurate, he had been a selfish man who wouldn’t listen to his
daughter when she explained that she was in love. His response was as
hard-hearted as Pharaoh’s was when the seventeen-year-old Sylvia told him that
she was going to be a mother and that the father was a student at the local
junior college. After the battle that ensued, Mom packed her suitcase and left,
never to go home again.

I was that
baby he wanted her to abort, Lillian thought, as she turned off the lights to
sleep. Wonder what he would have thought about me if he could have known me.
Even more, she wondered what he would think of her plans for the old house.Why he had left his home to her in his will
and directed that no one – not even her mother – hear of his death until six
months after his cremation remained a mystery.Stranger still was the fact that he revised his will ten years before he
suffered a debilitating stroke that put him in a long-term care facility.Thanks for the house, Grandpa, Lillian
thought, her gratitude mingled with sarcasm.Then she slept.

Her dreams
were about the house but on waking, she could not remember the details, just a
sense of Seven Oaks, and the large rooms. Her original plan was to contact a
realtor and an antiques dealer but she decided she wanted to visit the house
again before calling anyone. With a bag from McDonald’s in hand, she walked
back into the entryway and was as entranced as she had been the day before.

If
anything, the rush of emotions was stronger now and the house felt like home.
With the sun shining from the east, the entry hall sparkled with bright light
that highlighted every speck of dust. Cleaning the place – or hiring it done –
was a priority. She would do that before making any phone calls. That faint
musty smell she noticed on her first visit lingered but there was something
else. She sniffed and wrinkled her nose.If she didn’t know any different, she would swear she inhaled the scent
of fresh sausage frying and something that reminded her of Ivory soap.

Chalking it
up to the power of suggestion, she sat down on the steps to eat the sausage
biscuit and drink the orange juice.That aroma of sausage, she realized, came from her breakfast and the
Ivory soap was a figment of her imagination.By the time she sat down at the desk in the study with a phone directory
she found in a kitchen drawer, Lillian wasn’t looking for an antique dealer or
a realtor. A listing for a cleaning service caught her eye and she punched in
the numbers on her cell. Within moments, she arranged for a team from Tidy Gals
to clean the old house from top to bottom. She would have liked to have done
the chore herself but it would take too long.

Since the
crew would not arrive until tomorrow, she explored the house again, this time
visiting the attic – a wide, open space filled with furniture and odd bits from
the past – and even the cellar. There she found some ancient jars of some murky
substance that must have been jam or jelly, a broken table with three legs,
coal in the coal chute, and a carved wardrobe. Inside it, she found men’s
garments, suits from long ago. Each was on a hanger and covered with old sheets
to preserve the fabric. Whose they might have been she did not know but the
styles were too outdated to have been her grandfather’s.

Lillian
whiled away the rest of the day poking into every corner of the house. She
rifled through desk drawers, sorted through kitchen cabinets, and opened
drawers in the bedrooms upstairs. In the largest bedroom, she found an old copy
of The Virginian by Owen Wister, a
novel she remembered from a college lit class. The red cover had faded to almost
pink and she opened it with care. Handwriting on the flyleaf was too faint to
read until she carried the book to one of the windows and squinted at it in the
sunlight.

“Howard Speakman,
Christmas 1902, from Mother”.

Speakman was
the name that Mom said might have been the original owners. If so, then the
book must date back to the early years of the house. Howard was such an
old-fashioned sounding name now but back then, it could have been a young man
or even a boy.Lillian carried the book
with her when she left the bedroom; she could read it in her motel room later
if she was careful with the fragile pages.

After
picking up a turkey and Swiss sandwich at a small market not far from the house,
Lillian retreated to the motel and ate a solitary supper. After making phone
calls to both mother and sister, she settled down with the book and lost
herself in the world of late 19th century Montana. Although the language was flowery
and outdated, she enjoyed the story and stopped when she became too sleepy to
keep her eyes open.

Twenty-four
hours later, she was as exhausted as if she had cleaned the old house alone but
mounted the front steps with her suitcases in tow.The lawn – cut down to size by one of the
Tidy Gal’s teenage sons – got a nod of approval.As she
opened the front door, a burst of fresh, clean scents rushed out in greeting.
Each surface sparkled and was dust free; every bit of glass and each mirror
shone and the floors glistened. In each room Lillian looked for something to
find fault with, some little job left undone but could find nothing. Tidy Gals
had done their job well.

No more
motel rooms, she mused, as she chose the larger of the two front bedrooms as
headquarters. Both rooms faced out onto the lawn and had large windows. Each of
the rooms adjoined the bathroom. Privacy standards had changed, she thought, no
one today would want two bedrooms opening onto the same bathroom but in 1900 or
so, indoor plumbing was still a marvel. For the first time she wondered where
her grandfather had slept since neither of the front bedrooms held any personal
effects. Curious enough to search, Lillian toured the remaining upstairs rooms
and found that the smallest room, near the top of the rear stairs, must have
been her grandfather’s lair. That room held a narrow cot, the nightstand held
an outdated magazine, and the closet yielded men’s clothing, mostly polyester
slacks and Arrow shirts. A faint hint of liniment, Old Spice, and Vicks Vapor
Rub still hung in the air even after half a year. The very small bathroom next door held a
commode and sink; the shelves about it held a razor, dried out soap, and a
comb.

Mystery
solved, she returned to the front bedroom and unpacked the new bedding bought
that afternoon at the local Wal-MartSupercenter. She changed
the faded, thin linens and dropped them down a laundry chute in the rear
hallway, then went for a soak in the claw foot tub. Fingers crossed that the
plumbing was in working order; she filled the tub with warm water and added a
swirl of lavender bath salts. Lillian sank into the bath with a sigh of
pleasure, comfortable as a cat on a cushion in a sunny window.

From the
tub, she could see through the oak branches over the lawn and to the hills that
ringed the small town. Orange
from the setting sun streaked the sky and filtered through the green leaves on
the trees that ringed the house. Most of her fatigue slipped away into the bath
waters and Lillian relaxed, really relaxed for the first time since arriving.
Although the house she had expected to be a white elephant or an albatross
around her neck had proven to be comfortable and homey, the decision to stay
was definite, made during the long day and she felt content enough to sing.

She had
never had much of a singing voice and she could not quite carry a tune but
Lillian loved music so her voice soared, off-key into old songs, the kind of
songs she remembered from childhood. There had been a time when her mother sang
to her each night and the songs had not been traditional nursery rhymes but
vintage tunes. Strange but the songs were not from her mother’s own era but
even earlier, songs popular from around the turn of the century. Songs,
Lillian, thought that would have been popular in the era when Seven Oaks was
new. Although she discounted the idea of ghosts and haunting, a small shiver
rippled across her shoulders and she decided that bath time was over. She dried
off on a faded, thin bath towel (and made a mental note to buy new towels) and
combed out her waist length hair, then braided it wet.

Shadows
reached toward the high ceilings of the bedroom and she pulled her robe tighter
as she moved through the dimness to the lamp beside the bed. The pretty lamp
was as vintage as the rest of the furnishings. Roses bloomed on the white
porcelain base but the light cast by the lamp banished most of the shadows. Out
of habit, she pulled the drapes shut although no one who was not at tree top
level could see into the house and climbed into bed. Although the mattress felt
well used and more than a little lumpy, she wiggled into a comfortable spot and
opened The Virginian.

Although
the book engaged her senses, she found herself glancing through the open
bedroom door into the darker hallway every few minutes. The shadows there were
deeper in the darkness. Lamp light filtered out into the corridor and cast odd
shaped shadows. One that looked like an oval vase was the shadow of the lady’s
chair at the dresser and although she could not quite identify the source, the
outline that looked like a man in a broad brimmed hat must have a source inside
the bedroom. Reading about Montana cowboys was enough to imagine such a
hat, she thought, as she turned the final page and glanced out in the hall. The
shadow was gone.

That
disconcerted her enough that she tossed back the new comforter and stalked out
into the hall, eyes rotating back and forth. No shadows resembled the one she
had seen earlier and she felt no sense of dread, none of the angst a haunted
house should summon. Mimicking the cocksure tone of the team in Ghost Busters, she called out,

“I ain’t
afraid of no ghost.” Music from the theme song rocked her mind and she danced a
little to the imaginary beat. “If anyone – or anything – is here, come out,
come out wherever you are!”

No shapes
separated from the shadows, no odd sounds echoed through the quiet house so she
smiled, secure in her house and retired for the night.Once or twice, she stirred, not quite to
full consciousness but floated out of sleep for a few moments. Through her
sleep clogged senses, she heard the rhythmic creak of the old rocking chair in
one corner and once she thought – and wasn’t scared at all – that a man was
seated there, face hidden by a broad brimmed farmer’s hat. Awake, under normal
circumstances, a stranger’s presence in her bedroom would have both frightened
and angered Lillian but half asleep, she didn’t mind.